50 Years Ago, Sputnik Was an Improvised Triumph

caffiend666 sends in an AP article featuring interviews with the old men who launched the first satellite 50 year ago. The story they tell hinges on luck and the drive of one man, Sergei Korolyov, who died in 1966, unheralded in his lifetime. "When Sputnik took off 50 years ago, the world gazed at the heavens in awe and apprehension, watching what seemed like the unveiling of a sustained Soviet effort to conquer space and score a stunning Cold War triumph. But 50 years later, it emerges that the momentous launch was far from being part of a well-planned strategy to demonstrate communist superiority over the West... 'At that moment we couldn't fully understand what we had done,' Chertok recalled. 'We felt ecstatic about it only later, when the entire world ran amok'... And that winking light that crowds around the globe gathered to watch in the night sky? Not Sputnik at all, as it turns out, but just the second stage of its booster rocket."

I raise my glass to the Russians...

Who were, and remain, worthy competitors and partners as we reach to the stars.

Congratulations are due on the anniversary of this achievement and to their many achievements since. May they have many more, and may they help elevate this world and all that are in it.

Re:I raise my glass to the Russians...

Communist!

Ha!

Yes, yes, I know!

I'm actually quite capitalistic, but one must give credit where credit is due. The Russians did a great deal to bring us to where we are today in terms of space exploration. One would hope that, 2,000 years from now, our descendants will all look back at Sputnik and see it as a great triumph of all mankind, not just the accomplishment of one tribe trying to best another. The likelihood of this occurring is, of course, quite small, but one can dream.

I mean, just think about it - these guys put an object in orbit. It's common place today, I know, but to think that they were able to get it to work the first time still amazes me.

Excellent work, comrades. Excellent work!

Re:Ha!

I'm actually quite capitalistic, but one must give credit where credit is due.

You mean, to the government? After all it was one state sponsored program against another. The US program had the advantage of the wealth generated by an efficient economy though.

Re:Ha!

Actually, I think ultimate credit goes to the Chinese. After all, they invented gunpowder and were the first to design primitive rockets (i.e. fireworks, artillery), thus paving the way for later rocketeers (the ones that immediately come to mind are Goddard -> von Braun -> US/Soviet military rockets, etc.).

Re:I raise my glass to the Russians...

Linux and let's not forget: boobs!

Congratulations for getting 'linux' and 'boobs' into the same sentence. I don't think that's ever been achieved before.

Re:I raise my glass to the Russians...

Here's an excellent book on the Soviet space program [amazon.com], written waay back in 1981; I picked it up in a second hand shop a few years later and was completely engrossed. Oberg's ability to stitch together a fairly comprehensive history of the then still highly secretive Soviet spac program from public open source material is excellent, and the revelations about the early catastrophes (like the launch pad explosion that wiped out 200 of the best launch technicians and engineers they had, plus the head of the entire ICBM program, and the tragic deaths of various cosmonauts) were amazing to me, 20 years ago anyway.

Other Notable Achievements

Other Soviet space achievements include but not limited to:

* First mammal in space (dog)
* First human in space
* First human to orbit earth
* First images of far-side of the moon
* First images from surface of moon (lander)
* First landing and images from surface of another planet (Venus)

A lot of the Russian program was improvised

When you look at the history of Soviet space exploration, you often get the impression that "it builds and fits together, launch it" was more often than not the deciding factor.

It's kinda easier if you only have to announce launches AFTER they were successful. If it ain't, it's a test launch. Just like a lot of people play Minigolf.

Re:

When you look at the history of Soviet space exploration, you often get the impression that "it builds and fits together, launch it" was more often than not the deciding factor.

Isn't this one of the main tenets of Hacker Philosophy - to play around with technology and see where that gets you?

Re:A lot of the Russian program was improvised

[...] throw lots of money at the problem and hope some sticks...

What money? Read the RTFA! It was an impromptu project by one man and his team of scientists, a creative effort to push the existing tech and skills to their limits, not a government project with slipping deadlines and inflated funding. And anyway, Russian space program was funded sparingly for most of its history, when compared to NASA.

My point expressed in GP still holds.

Re:A lot of the Russian program was improvised

Actually, a lot of Russian space technology was built on old technologies and as a result was quite reliable. For example, the R-7 rocket used to launch Sputnik used technologies from 20-s and there's a story that burning logs were used to ignite the first stage engines. But at the same time computer modeling (yes, even at that time!) was used to compute boosters parameters.

BTW, R-7 and its successors have become the most successful launch systems so far.

Re:A lot of the Russian program was improvised

Just ask NASA who could rescue a shuttle stuck in orbit before they ran out of air/water/food, not NASA they couldn't get their "reusable" shuttle in orbit in less than 56 days, whereas the Russians sensibly had a Soyuz or Progress craft on standby at all times to mount a rescue of their Cosmonauts?

Re:

"When you look at the history of Soviet space exploration, you often get the impression that "it builds and fits together, launch it" was more often than not the deciding factor"

Please look again:
http://www.amazon.com/Soviet-Space-Race-Apollo/dp/0813026288 [amazon.com]

Re:A lot of the Russian program was improvised

No, they invented how you can get away with omitting the "fits together" part.

Sounds of Sputnik

Amsat.org has a page which features a little blurb as well as sounds from the first satellites. For Sputnik, there are two signal recordings.

See http://www.amsat.org/amsat/features/sounds/firstsat.html [amsat.org]
This page has the two recordings both in .wav and .ra formats.

Red Moon Rising - BBC Radio4

This week's book of the week on Radio 4 is "Red Moon Rising", which is all about the building of Sputnik.

Available on Listen Again each day: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/arts/book_week.shtml [bbc.co.uk]

The effects....

"We didn't believe that you would outpace the Americans with your satellite, but you did it. Now you should launch something new by Nov. 7," Korolyov quoted Khrushchev telling him, according to Grechko.

And then America got their ass in gear and realized that science is important and started a program that vastly improved science education and learning science became the "cool" thing to do.

There were some benefits in the existence of the Soviet Union.

Eisenhower wanted the Soviets to be first in space

Werner von Braun's group launched a rokect in early 1956 that could have reached orbit if it had a fourth stage - no fourth stage was installed on the express orders of Eisenhower. Ike's reasoning was that if the Soviets launched first, their satellites would overfly the US first and thus the Soviets would have been in no position to complain about US satellites overflying the Soviet Union.

The top US space priority in the late 1950's was developing photo recconnaisance under cover of the Discoverer program.

Improvised "Triumph"

I gotta quit reading motorcycle blogs just before reading Slashdot. All I could think was you had a satellite that leaked oil and every time it was in Earth's shadow the electrics would fail. I guess it really was like a 1960s Triumph -- you get it started once and take the hell off, and hope to God it stays running for the whole trip.

The real space junk is the myths.

First, "the world" did not "gaze at the heavens in awe and apprehension" as Sputnik orbited. America gazed at the heavens in awe and apprehension, but as Americans often need reminding, America is not the entire world.

Second, in the 1950s everyone was shitting themselves over the prospect of a global thermonuclear holocaust, and so the whole space race was the transformation of rocket science from a cool but fairly arcane and quiet field of science into some sort of overhyped modern day mythic single combat, with astronauts painted as knights in white armor championing and defending their tribes, doing some sort of weird imaginary battle in the skies. It wasted a lot of tax money that could have been better spent on American schools and hospitals and Russian food and clothing, and did pretty much nothing towards overthrowing the tyranny of Stalin, who killed many more of his own citizens than Hitler, or making the governments of the US and USSR understand that the other side were in fact humans and not demons or animals.

It did get a whole hell of a lot of astronauts laid like you wouldn't believe, though. I strongly recommend reading Tom Wolfe's "The Right Stuff," even if you have forgotten how to read an entire book, because it's an easy read and very well worth it. I especially love the section where he describes how Chuck Yeager pretty much ascended bodily to Pilot Heaven when he became the first person to break the sound barrier during level flight on October 14, 1947, years before the space race was even so much as a bad dream.

Finally, the USSR had the early lead in unmanned flight but the US eventually won in manned flight, so you could say that in Soviet Russia, people launched rockets to the moon, but in the United States, rockets launched YOU!

Re:The real space junk is the myths.

You know what always gets me is the money better spent argument.

Subtract Sputnik
Subtract Yuri G
Subtract a Man on the Moon
Subtract Hubble
Subtract the Voyager Probes
Subtract the Mir and the ISS
Subtract the Mars Rovers

First, you would have tiny science section at Barns&Noble, no neat documentaries on television and little or no satellite communications networks. You would have reduced meteorological warnings, reduced understanding of agriculture, global warming and the ozone layer, a reduced understanding of the Universe, it's meaning and what makes things work, reduced understanding of fission, fusion and the Sun, and no beautiful awe-inspiring photographs to look at on the Internet. In fact, the Internet might not work as well even, because of those satellite things above. And maybe the Vatican and Catholics still think we are the center of the Universe.

And secondly, we'd be stuck on this rock, with no hope of escaping. No doubt, we are all going to die here, eventually. What good will any human accomplishments ever be? If not for the above things, that would be the inevitable mindset, hopelessness. Have you ever really looked at the picture of Earth from the Moon? Have you ever read the Carl Sagan essay, Pale Blue Dot? I can think of no single picture, words and idea that brings humans together. It is everyones home, the only one we've ever had, after all.

A fraction, FRACTION of the federal US budget is spent on NASA. I, for one, see science and space exploration as beneficial to all humans. For me, every dollar that goes into a new probe, or improved human presence in space, whatever the "motivation" for doing so, is a dollar better spent.

all this talk of sputniks...

and no mention of Nancy Luft?

Recall the mass media complaining about possible radioactive fallout over India, some years ago, from a Russian sputnik that was nuclear powered? Today's sputniks are far more powerful then the ones that caused that 1908 Tunguska Explosion because they are nuclear powered and the Russians are not using nuclear power to only spy, no way! Plus today's sputniks are fully computerized and do things much faster. The Special Sputnik Forces of the Russian Military tell me that they care very easily kill over 95% of all Americans, with their sputniks alone, no nukes, without any warning what so ever, in a matter of a few minutes, any time that they care to do so. But the Russians can only vaporize a limited number of cities and then they will cause a nuclear winter sort of event that will kill them, too. - And we couldn't have that now could we? Carrying a dire warning on the very first page that "USA to be annihilated!", this website, http://hometown.aol.com/nancyaluft/ [aol.com], is the home of dedicated net kook and certifiable paranoid Nancy Luft whom, with her genius level IQ (which would account for her excellent grasp of grammar and sentence construction) and her BA (whoo-hoo!) is trying desperately to warn us all of the terrible dangers of Russia's Special Sputnik Forces. Since time immemorial Russian sputniks (which, she tells us early in the piece, means "travelling companion") armed with gamma rays and ray guns have been causing earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, Presidential assassinations, space shuttle disasters and all sorts of plagues and pestilences. They've been at it for centuries, even before the invention of spaceflight and, heck, even before there was a Russia! The Tunguska impact in 1908 for example wasn't a meteor, it was caused by Russian sputniks! MS, cancer, heart attacks, crop circles and every air crash ever have all been carved out by an orbiting army of Russian killer satellites shooting everything that moves with an array of invisible ray beams. They were also responsible for Nostradamus making his predictions, Jesus walking on water, Edgar Cayce healing people by touch alone and Abe Lincoln winning the Civil War. Oh, and they also caused Mt St Helens to explode and shot down the space shuttle Challenger, which she tried to tell people about but they wouldn't listen. And how does Nancy know these things? The Russians are transmitting their thoughts to her by microwave. She's tried writing to various Presidents about all this but, strangely, they just don't take any notice.

Re:an extraordinary claim!

Actually, its kind of true (but with a different spin, of course).

The fact was, that the US program deemed the nuclear missile program as too sensitive and secret to let scientist mess with it, so they were forced to do a parallel development with the vanguard program (which of course lagged behind without the military budget).

The seperation was there, but the reason wasnt one of public image, but of paranoid secrecy.

Re:first mutt in space ..

"Laika died of a heart attack early in the mission (not too surprising!)"
There was no mention at the time of Laika dying in orbit, indeed the impression given was thet he safely returned to earth. Later on they mentioned him dying during reentry or euthanized [tedstrong.com] by injection in orbit, or died of fright [dogsinthenews.com] just after take-off, later on in a book written by one of the Russians who actually worked on the project there is mention of the mutt being electrocuted.

- Laika was a she
- Sputnik 2 couldn't reenter, so mechanisms were added to euthanize her. There was enough food and supplies to keep her alive for a week. The mechanism was poisoned food, not electrocution.
- Wikipedia says [wikipedia.org] she died after 5 to 7 hours into the flight because the temperature control system failed.

Also notice that Laika's death is mostly played up in the US, probably becuase of cold war propaganda. The rest of the world knows who Laika is, and is surprised to learn that she died in orbit.